Trust is the foundation of effective teamwork. When it comes to human relationships, the concept of trust gets pushed around quite often, for good reason. Understanding how to build trust in teams means creating an environment where people can communicate openly and rely on each other. There are ancient psychological reasons why humans cooperate better in any kind of endeavor when they trust each other. Whether it’s a romantic, family, or work relationship, trust is a kind of fundamental glue, crucial to the success of the relationship itself.
With trust, teams can communicate faster and resolve issues more quickly. But without trust, even the simplest process can slow down because people start withholding information, questioning decisions, avoiding discussions, or protecting themselves instead of focusing on the work.
At Ziken Labs, collaboration between people with different skills is an integral part of daily work. For this reason, in today’s article, we will try to illustrate some strategies and tips on how to build trust in teams, highlighting both the benefits and the serious risks that a lack of it could entail.
What trust means in a team and why it is important
We should first define the concept of trust, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” In a professional environment, trust can be understood as confidence that other people will behave with reasonable honesty. You do not need to agree with every colleague or become close friends; it means you’ll just act in good faith and that problems will be discussed constructively when they arise.
A healthy team isn’t one in which everyone constantly agrees. In fact, disagreement can be very valuable. Team members should feel safe enough to challenge an assumption or point out a problem; those differences can improve the final decision. Without trust, collaboration is impossible, because we live in constant fear of the other party or parties. We tend to hide things, feel uncomfortable admitting mistakes, and, in many cases, even behave dishonestly, being rude to colleagues, relatives, or acquaintances because “I don’t trust him/her/them.”
This attitude in the workplace comes at a cost, which we will explore later. Let’s focus on what a calm, loyal, and open office or company can achieve thanks to trust.
Trust makes it easier to ask questions and contribute to efficiency
Safety creates a climate of tranquility, which in turn fosters greater openness, a key element for efficiency. If I know I can trust my colleagues and superiors, knowing they won’t judge or ridicule me, I’ll have no problem asking questions, especially if I don’t fully understand a task or procedure I’m involved in. Asking questions without fear is essential for personal growth and, consequently, brings enormous benefits to the productivity of the team and, ultimately, the company itself.
Let’s consider a simple situation: an employee receives an assignment that he is not completely sure about. In a low-trust environment, he may decide not to ask for clarification because he is afraid of appearing inexperienced or unprepared. This situation may cause work to be based on a wrong assumption that later needs to be corrected by another colleague, and time is lost. The problem could have been solved in minutes rather than hours or days. This is one reason why trust can contribute to efficiency.
Trust will make team members bolder
They’ll dare more because they know they won’t be judged or punished, and this will translate into innovation in processes, products, or any other activity the team is responsible for. Innovation also involves interpersonal risk. Suggesting a different process, challenging established practice, or presenting an unusual idea creates the possibility that others will disagree. If employees expect new ideas to be dismissed due to hierarchy, personality, or past reactions, they eventually learn to keep them to themselves. Therefore, a company loses valuable insights without ever realizing it.
Google’s research project Aristotle, made to understand team effectiveness, identified psychological safety as the most important of the five group dynamics examined, along with dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.
Trust improves the daily work environment
People spend a significant portion of their lives working. An environment characterized by suspicion, hidden conflicts, and unpredictable reactions can make ordinary tasks unnecessarily stressful. Trust doesn’t make every day easier and can’t eliminate deadlines and disagreements. However, it can make these challenges easier to address. This creates a stronger foundation for morale, collaboration, and long-term performance.
A work environment based on trust is significantly better: it makes people happier, gives them a sense of purpose beyond the company, and improves morale. Which, in itself, improves everything else, fostering success. So, how can we create this magical work environment and an atmosphere where everything is perfect?
Well, let’s not exaggerate (perfection is far from human), but there are several strategies and tips that, if implemented, can significantly improve the level of trust in your company. Google researchers have found that individuals who work in stronger teams (in terms of trust and security) are less likely to leave the company. Harvard organizational behavior scientist Amy Edmondson pioneered the concept of “team psychological safety.” To measure a team’s level of psychological safety, Edmondson asked team members to answer simple questions. Her recommendations include:
- View work as a learning challenge, not a performance challenge;
- Recognize your own fallibility;
- Show curiosity and ask lots of questions.
10 practical strategies on how to build trust in your team
Before listing the tricks, we need to point out that building trust is an ongoing process that must be constantly monitored and improved. There are certainly some things that, once in place, don’t require much maintenance. But there is no magic formula that requires no effort. There is no single activity that creates lasting trust. A retreat, workshop, dinner, or motivational speech can support relationships, but none of them can compensate for inconsistent behavior during the rest of the year. The following trust-building strategies focus on everyday experiences.
1. Consistency
Consistency is one of the simplest principles to understand and one of the hardest to maintain. As a leader, you must be the first to apply all the following. Therefore, for us, consistency is crucial. This means that if you ask your team to show honesty and vulnerability, you must be the first to demonstrate them.
If you, as a leader, ask employees to be punctual but regularly arrive late yourself, the message is weakened. If expectations change repeatedly without explanation, people may stop believing that the stated rules matter. If you expect accountability, acknowledge your own mistakes.
Leading by example means applying the standards you promote. Consistency does not mean refusing to change your mind. Good leaders change course when evidence changes. The important part is explaining why the decision changed instead of acting as though the previous commitment never existed.
- Clear expectations and responsibilities
Trust becomes difficult when no one knows exactly who is responsible for what.
Ambiguous roles create situations where two people assume the other will complete a task, important decisions remain unresolved, or employees are evaluated based on expectations they were not aware of. Clear responsibilities reduce this uncertainty.
3. Making good hires
A big, perhaps the biggest, job you can do is hire the right people. This means you’ll need to look for the characteristics that will make new hires a good fit for your existing team. Hiring is one of the first opportunities to influence team trust. During the selection process, it’s important to assess both professional skills and a willingness to collaborate. Interviews can explore how candidates have handled different situations where trust and responsibilities were shared. This doesn’t mean hiring like-minded people. Healthy teams benefit from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. The goal is to find people who can disagree constructively and contribute their expertise without turning every discussion into a status competition.
4. Spend time together
Employees need to spend time together. This is no joke. People generally trust colleagues who understand each other more easily. There’s no way a relationship could thrive if the people involved don’t know each other, except by name, and perhaps even by job description. Time spent together can be both at work and outside of it. Informal conversations, group lunches, workshops, collaborative planning sessions, and occasional social activities can help colleagues learn how others think and communicate. However, forced socialization can have the opposite effect. Not everyone enjoys the same activities, and employees shouldn’t feel that access to professional relationships depends on giving up excessive personal time.
For remote teams, like the Ziken Labs team, this principle becomes even more important because spontaneous conversations in the office are less frequent. Brief informal check-ins or optional virtual socializing can sometimes replace some of that missing contact.
- Comunicazione
Effective communication requires clarity and the opportunity to ask questions. Priorities and decisions could not be clear to the employees even if there is a massive message exchange. Listening is as important as speaking. When an important decision affects the team, explain the reasoning whenever possible. Asking probing questions and clarifying what will happen next demonstrates that voicing one’s opinion has a purpose and a value. Above all, don’t repeatedly ask for feedback. People will notice when surveys, meetings and feedback sessions never lead to concrete action. When a suggestion can’t be implemented, explain why.
6. Honesty and vulnerability
Vulnerability should be appropriate to the professional context. The important thing is to demonstrate that uncertainty and fallibility are normal aspects of complex work. Employees should have the freedom to be honest with each other and with their leaders, to show their vulnerability and to be open about their work-related issues. Admitting misunderstandings or mistakes, and doing so directly and transparently, must be the norm. Hidden mistakes can become a serious problem, while having teams that admit them as soon as they are made is valuable, as it allows the system to address them immediately.
Furthermore, this behavior is what strengthens relationships among colleagues and with leaders.
7. Ideas evaluation
Everyone’s ideas must be evaluated, obviously through a process that ensures efficiency, based on their actual value and not on the person’s position in the company or team.
Leading a team, no matter how large, does not and should not mean being infallible and that less experienced employees are incapable of finding solutions that have never been thought of. A junior employee may notice a problem that a manager has overlooked. This doesn’t mean that every suggestion should be adopted, but it does mean that ideas should be evaluated based on evidence, relevance, feasibility, and expected impact.
Leaders can reinforce this principle by seeking the views of more reserved team members, allowing people to challenge proposals respectfully, and giving credit to the person who proposed an idea. Teams build trust when people believe their contributions will receive due consideration, regardless of their role.
- Autonomy
How often do you find yourself responsible for a specific task, but your boss doesn’t trust you to leave it to yourself?
It’s true, in some situations it can be risky to leave all the work in the hands of someone else, especially when it comes to new hires or high-risk activities. But when members have the right skills, you should let them do it themselves. Delegation works best if boundaries and tasks are clearly defined from the start. Therefore, specify the desired outcome, important constraints, the deadline, resources, and which decisions require approval.
If you have difficulty delegating work, try this simple rule: the 70/30 rule. It’s a time and resource management principle. If someone can do a job at least 70% as well as you, then you should delegate it. This rule helps overcome the perfectionism trap and free up managers’ precious time.
9. Difficult conversations and the courage to face them
This is very important. Even in an environment characterized by mutual trust, difficult conversations, such as pointing out attitudes, mistakes, or dissatisfaction, can still be problematic.
What we seek is peace of mind, and sometimes we think that avoiding openly criticizing a colleague or superior will guarantee just that. But in the long run, the opposite happens. Just like in a romantic relationship, we cannot and should not expect our colleagues to read our minds. So, the sooner difficult situations are resolved, the better.
If there is a problem, we must address it as soon as possible, because if we don’t, the situation worsens, turns into resentment, and can lead to serious consequences. This is not easy. As we’ve said, it requires constant adjustments and is therefore a never-ending process.
- Support and contribution
Finally, it’s important to know when someone has done a good job and communicate it. People want to know that useful work is being noticed, and it’s important that you do so.
You don’t need awards; simply communicating that you’ve recognized it is enough. Instead of offering a generic compliment like “great job” or “well done,” you can try explaining what was done well and why it was useful, such as “Thanks to the work you did, we were able to deliver the project to the client early.”
So, what happens when your employees do not trust each other, or worse?
Well, it would be all too easy to describe the atmosphere of a company that doesn’t invest in its employees as that of a village full of gossip. Trust may seem intangible, but its effects are often observable. Let’s have a closer look at the secrets.
Trust, tips and secrets
As we’ve already mentioned, if your employees don’t trust you and each other, they’ll be much less open about mistakes and misunderstandings. They won’t speak up when they disagree, and even less so when they don’t understand something.
This leads to two problems: reduced efficiency and a lack of innovation. Trying to regain lost trust is much more complex than building it step by step from the beginning. When this happens, however, it’s important to follow these steps. First, you need to identify what went wrong. And no, it’s not all down to a “simple communication problem.” Once the problem is identified, you need to find a corrective action. If expectations are consistently met, you’ll have the opportunity to rebuild what was lost through consistency.
For those who work remotely, some signals can be harder to recognize. Online, even a delayed response can be misinterpreted. Therefore, it’s important to try to build a human relationship even remotely and clearly define needs so as to leave no room for misinterpretation.
Turnover, an avoidable cost
An unfavorable work environment, such as one created by a lack of trust, is unpleasant. And that means turnover. The consequences aren’t necessarily dramatic from the start, but over time, people will seek other jobs with better conditions.
When people aren’t comfortable directly discussing a colleague’s behavior, problems can escalate into private conversations, gossip, avoidance, or passive resistance. Because they’re dissatisfied with their work environment and don’t trust management or colleagues enough to open up about both their mistakes and their ideas, employees will do whatever is necessary to avoid being fired.
And this isn’t a good thing for a private company. It goes without saying that this will also compromise productivity and efficiency, undermining your company’s chances of success.
Employees consider more than just their salary when deciding whether to stay with an organization. Their daily experience with managers and colleagues is also important.
We want to provide you with a simple routine you can follow to build trust. Understanding how to build trust in teams becomes easier when general principles are translated into general habits. So leaders can ask themselves some of these practical questions every week. Did I keep my commitments? Did I explain important changes? Did I solicit input from those who typically speak less? Did I specifically acknowledge useful work? Did I address a problem directly instead of letting it drag on? Did I give unnecessary instructions to someone because I wasn’t comfortable delegating? Did someone bring me bad news, and how did I react?
Money matters less than emotional support
We want to conclude with a warning. You may be tempted to raise salaries above the minimum to keep morale high, but that’s a grave mistake. Money only works for a couple of months, but it can’t buy employee motivation. As highlighted in a Harvard Business School article, while money is certainly appreciated by employees, its effect tends to fade rather quickly after the raise. What remains and continues to be a motivational factor is the work environment and the company’s active and sincere encouragement.
People want to feel important, part of something meaningful. And this feeling can motivate much more than the occasional raise.
In summary, we encourage you to create a work environment where trust and human relationships contribute to the well-being of your staff. It’s easy to talk about trust in abstract terms, but the real test comes in ordinary moments. And since none of these actions are particularly striking, we encourage you to pay attention to your small gestures, because they are the ones that make the difference.
This will result in greater productivity, greater efficiency, faster innovation, lower costs, and, ultimately, more lasting happiness for all stakeholders. Including you.
